Legacy, page 24
Yuri had an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach, as if something important was eluding him, though it was perhaps just the borscht? ‘But you said The Indian was not one man. So who did he meet?’
‘I said “not one man I’d ever met”. It’s like I said. A meeting was arranged. I took your man Kyle and then stayed outside. I don’t know who he met with. But I hear rumours. And everyone that’s ever met The Indian gives a different story. Sometimes he’s a she… Sometimes a blonde… And sometimes a man with dark hair and a beard. So it ain’t hard to figure that he’s more than one person.’
Yuri wasn’t sure he was feeling any less confused. ‘So how would someone like me get to meet The Indian?’
Raven-beak grinned. ‘You don’t! Not unless I make it happen.’
Yuri raised a hand. The conversation was beginning to irritate him.
Emboldened, Raven-beak just knocked it aside. ‘And that ain’t the way it’s going to happen.’
‘So, what will it take?’
‘Look – I’m going to be putting myself at hazard here, so it’s gotta be worth my while.’
Yuri decided to indulge the man. Threats weren’t going to get him what he wanted. ‘So, what will it take?’
‘You’re WMC aren’t you?’
Yuri nodded. It was hardly an admission.
‘Good – then you shouldn’t find this a problem.’ Raven-beak was now looking altogether too relaxed. ‘I want two cases of Redbank bourbon. I want tobacco – ten pouches of the good stuff. Ile de Castro, or something like that. And I want stims. NovaStim and Sandman. Twenty hits of each,’ he said, rattling off what sounded like a pre-rehearsed shopping list.
‘That stuff’s not on the inventory,’ Yuri observed. In fact most of it was illegal in New Chicago, which was of course why he wanted it.
‘But you can get it.’
It was not a question.
Yuri nodded. ‘I can get it.’
‘Good… You have twenty-four hours. Get the merchandise for me and then meet me at Madame Leferau’s. I trust you’re happy with the venue?’
Yuri nodded. He knew the place of course…
‘Good.’
Presuming that he was now free to go, Raven-beak walked off.
Yuri had then decided to check out the proposed venue for their exchange. Ordinarily, Raven-beak’s list of demands would not have been too challenging. The items he’d requested were not readily available on the WMC’s inventory, but procuring them would not be beyond his means, though if what Pitor had said was true, getting his hands on them was going to be tough.
Figuring that he needed a place to lay low and some time to think, Madame Leferau’s had seemed as good a place as any, and given its reputation for being the best-known secret in the slums, it should not have surprised him that Jacob might have reached the same conclusion, though quite how he’d come to discover the place was beyond him.
Nevertheless, that’s where Yuri had discovered him, in what had been perhaps the second most unlikely encounter of the day. Jacob had been wearing overalls much like those belonging to any grubber and his face was as beaten and as bruised as those who indulged in the undercity’s most popular pastimes, the muggings and brawling, that Yuri had not recognised him straight away, though something in his manner had distinguished him from every other grubber he’d seen that day. Jacob’s skin was almost immaculate, lacking the usual tattoos, dirt, and oil, that would have commonly been seen upon someone in his line of work, and he’d seemed ill at ease with his surroundings – incongruities enough to have drawn Yuri’s eye…
Only then had he recognised his friend and colleague – Jacob.
But what of the woman standing next to him? Yuri was sure he’d never seen her before.
The woman had been engaged in some deal with Madame Leferau while Jacob looked on with interest.
Yuri had waited.
Madame Leferau had concluded their business with a click of her fingers, summoning a serving girl who’d then led Jacob and the woman away.
Yuri had dithered a moment, allowing them a head start before following at a discrete distance. Having then reached the fifth floor, he’d waited on the stairwell for the serving girl to return, his accomplished imitation of a man under the influence of alcohol rendering him virtually invisible to a woman who was so used to ignoring the habits of drunken patrons going to and fro.
It had then been no challenge to discover the room to which she’d escorted them. The curtain that served as a door had muted their conversation, but not so much that he’d been unable to recognise Jacob’s voice. But curious to learn who the woman might have been, he didn’t introduce himself straight away, and loitered instead in a hidden place to one side of the door.
And he had waited…
And listened.
And only once the conversation had finished, did he choose to make his appearance…
46
There were sounds of commotion coming from the compound behind them, along with the guttural roar of some machine being woken. Tammy wondered what it might be, right up until the moment it appeared at the gate. She’d never seen anything quite like it, though she recognised many similarities to the rusted vehicles dotted along the ribbons of synth-rock. It consisted of a metal cockpit designed to hold two people, and a four-wheeled flatbed mounting a heavy calibre auto-mag.
She picked up her pace, overtaking Jocelyn who had until now been leading the way. The buzz-sawing of bullets pecking the ground a few metres behind them was all the encouragement she needed. If they could make it to the dense trees and broken buildings that lay ahead of them, they might be safe. The uneven ground and convoluted paths between the trees would hopefully be too much for the machine chasing them.
But they were still too far away, and at this distance, the trees were nothing more than a promise of safety. Tammy considered sprinting to them across open ground. It was perhaps no more than three or four hundred metres to the treeline and their pursuer’s aim was none too accurate. Given her unnatural strength and endurance, she would have stood a better-than-even chance of getting there alive.
But Jocelyn would stand almost no chance at all.
It was possible she’d been lying about the nanites swarming in Tammy’s blood, but she doubted it. She could feel them… She could not afford to let Jocelyn die.
It seemed that their only hope lay in the string of carriages paraded along one of the paired metal rails to the landward side of the grey ribbon. These rails had become quite prolific as they approached the storage silos, having branched again and again to form nine or ten parallel sets, upon which were a number of rusting carriages, similar in concept to the beetle-like ground cars, but larger. The carriages did not look sound enough to withstand the bullets from a heavy auto-mag, but they would obscure them enough to draw some fire as they then turned towards the trees. Hopping nimbly between the tracks, Tammy hurried towards them.
But Jocelyn was not as agile as Tammy. She stumbled.
Bullets shrieked as they danced around them and into a nearby carriage.
An explosion echoed from somewhere inside the camp and a thick oily fireball swept skywards trailing a tail of greasy black smoke.
Tammy hauled Jocelyn to her feet and dragged her amongst the carriages.
‘We’ll never make it,’ said Jocelyn, measuring the distance with her eyes.
‘We have to make it,’ Tammy insisted. ‘If it gets any closer to us, that auto-mag is going to tear us to pieces, whether we’re behind one of these carriages or not.’ As if to underscore her point, a line of holes appeared in the wall above their heads. She couldn’t see the ATV, but she could hear it gunning its way towards them. ‘So, let’s do it – now!’
It seemed that Jocelyn required no other encouragement. The near misses had dispelled any remaining reservations. She started to run, making a good pace towards the trees.
The ATV manoeuvred into view before they were halfway across. A few mercifully poor shots hammered chips from the ground near their feet as the gunner struggled to compensate for the vehicle’s blustering movements. But neither one of them hesitated. They kept on running. Their only hope lay in the treeline a couple of hundred metres away.
There was another burst of fire from the auto-mag. Tammy could hear the whip-snap of the rounds puncturing the air around her. Perhaps Jocelyn had been right after all…
And then the ground exploded behind them, swallowing the ATV in clouds of smoke and shrapnel.
The gyrojet was an unexpected ally. It was flying so low it barely cleared the roofs and treetops. Tammy only noticed it at the last moment, basking in a current of turbid air: a shark amongst shifting currents, its turbofans barely a whisper.
Tammy didn’t hesitate to wonder why none of the rockets were winging their way toward them. She ran headlong into the trees, leaving the smoking wreckage of the ATV scattered across the ground behind them.
And didn’t stop…
47
There were footsteps approaching the doorway. Whoever it was, they were being careful to advertise themselves, planting their feet with slow deliberation so as not to spook anyone.
Rebecca drew her weapon and slipped to one side of the doorway. At close range, the Glock Mk102 5.5mm electro-mag was a formidable weapon. Its low-profile tungsten-tipped rounds could rip through a centimetre of steel plating at a range of up to twenty metres, though beyond that, it was of little use. The short barrel of the Guardian variant e-mag pistol and its consequent shortcomings had limited its popularity, but it was, nevertheless, quiet, discrete, and easily concealed, and could ruin the day of anyone standing at the wrong end of it.
‘It is me – Yuri. I am looking for Jacob.’
Jacob waved her down. ‘It’s okay – I know him.’ There was no mistaking that distinctive Ukrainian inflexion that was common amongst those born in the Hephaestan mines. Then more loudly he said, ‘it’s okay Yuri – you can come in.’
Yuri swept the curtain aside and stepped through. Noticing the gun in Rebecca’s hands, he hesitated. ‘She knows I am friendly – yes?’
Jacob nodded. ‘Yes – she knows you are friendly.’ He spoke loudly, for Rebecca’s benefit.
She lowered her gun but did not return it to her pocket. Nor did she engage the safety. Nevertheless the move had been enough to reassure Yuri.
‘My friend it is good to see you,’ he said, his face expanding in a smile. ‘When you did not return home, I began to worry. The world has gone crazy you know. The ERT are arresting people here, there, and everywhere. All WMC…’ He waved his arms emphatically. ‘They came to your home. But I managed to get away.’
Jacob frowned at Rebecca. ‘Why would they do that?’
She looked genuinely surprised but said nothing
Yuri walked over to the bed and plumped himself down on the edge of the mattress. ‘Fuck knows why,’ he replied thinking that the question had been directed at him. ‘Perhaps they think we are terrorists? Perhaps they think we blew up their headquarters?’
Rebecca’s face drained of all colour. This was news to her. ‘What are you talking about?!’
Yuri rumbled the sound of an explosion while throwing his hands out in a crude imitation of a mushroom cloud.
‘No!’ Rebecca was reeling, though other than the whip-crack expression of her dismay, the signs were subtle, the narrowing of the eyes and the listless sagging of her shoulders.
Yuri seemed surprised. He jutted his chin towards her in a gesture that conveyed an accusation as much as suspicion. ‘So, who is this woman?’
‘This is Rebecca,’ said Jacob succinctly.
‘And?’
‘And what?’ Jacob’s petulance was unintended. Like Rebecca, he’d found the news of the attack on the ERT headquarters profoundly disturbing. The hope that he might exonerate himself of his alleged crimes had just diminished to nothing. There was no way they were going to believe he was innocent now.
‘Who is she?’ Yuri persisted.
‘She’s…’
Jacob had started to explain but Rebecca finished his sentence for him. ‘…Officer Rebecca Lake – Homeland Security.’
‘Shit!’ Yuri jumped to his feet. Though he’d been listening in on their conversation, the snippets that had reached his ears had not been enough to implicate her as an officer in the ERT.
‘She’s fine – I think. She rescued me from the Capitol Spire,’ Jacob explained before indulging him with a brief history of his arrest and subsequent “escape”. If it had not been for her, he too would have died in the explosion.
‘It is a bad day for us all I think,’ said Yuri morosely.
******
Yuri and Jacob had both endured a restless night on the floor, though come the morning, neither one of them had been in any position to comment on how well Rebecca might have slept, but, had they been asked, they would doubtless have received the answer “much better than they had”. She had after all, won the bed in that usual act of democracy that always seemed to favour the female sex…
Her bed was empty.
Jacob could not remember hearing her leave and Yuri seemed equally baffled, though he was at first more vocal about the fact that he’d been forced to sleep on the floor while a perfectly good bed had gone unused. Jacob’s thoughts had been of a more morbid nature, wondering if she’d perhaps had a change of heart and betrayed him to the authorities, and he’d half expected to hear the footsteps of heavily armed ERT troopers coming up the corridor at any moment. Had he been fit to move, he might have been paranoid enough to voice his fears to Yuri, urging him to find them an alternative hideout, but as it happened, he was too broken in body and spirit to care.
But when the footsteps had returned, it had been one pair and not many. And they had belonged to Rebecca.
She blustered through the curtain, half oblivious to their presence. She’d been crying and her cheeks had the look of granite weathered by the rain.
‘What’s wrong?’ Yuri asked, in an uncharacteristic display of sympathy.
‘It’s all gone,’ she replied.
Jacob was still groggy from his sleep. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘ERT Head Office… It’s all gone. Blown to pieces within hours of our departure!’ Her words were a proclamation like thunder.
Jacob’s grogginess was rapidly overwhelmed by a feeling of stomach-turning nausea that had nothing to do with his recent beatings or lack of sleep. ‘And I’m guessing that they think I’m somehow responsible, even though I was locked up and being beaten the whole time?’
Yuri’s look became one of horror. He’d gleaned something of Jacob’s ordeal at the hands of the ERT but had not imagined that they could so violently abuse a member of the WMC.
Rebecca remained unperturbed. Her feelings had been washed away. ‘No – they think we were somehow responsible. You – and me. I wanted to make contact with the ERT. To see if everything your friend said was true.’ She glanced at Yuri. ‘Down here we’re “off the grid”, so I needed to go outside to access the ERT’s CommNet. But I failed... It won’t accept my login.’
Yuri did not need to vocalise the obvious question, his face said it all.
She glared back at him. ‘Don’t worry – I’m not exactly an amateur. I took myself well away from here and rerouted through one of the spoke servers. They have no idea where we are.’
Yuri’s head bopped respectfully. ‘You say you failed… How?’
Her features did not soften though her anger appeared to have been directed elsewhere. ‘My operational clearance has been “revoked” – apparently. Of course, I didn’t know it right away.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So, I tried a friend of mine in Homeland. Someone I could rely on to be discrete. And he informed me that we’ve been listed as prime suspects. Of course, if he’d really believed it, he wouldn’t have given me the tip off…’
‘So why would anyone else believe it?’ Yuri asked.
‘I don’t know. My friend knows me well enough to believe that I couldn’t possibly have done such a thing, but as far as anyone else can see, I appropriated a transport to take you away from the tower minutes before the explosion took place…’
Jacob was incredulous. ‘That’s it – that’s all they’ve got?’
‘Someone… probably someone high up… has already decided on your guilt. And mine by association.’
‘So, you believe me now?’
‘No!’ Rebecca’s eyes were chips of mica in the stalwart carving of her face. ‘Not entirely…’ She pointed her arm, projecting images from her PA onto the wall. It was clearly video footage from one of the cells in the ERT complex. Jacob’s body ached at the memory. There were two men talking at a table. The first wore a suit with the complexion of spun steel, and the second, the familiar orange overalls of a man accused. A man that Yuri had clearly recognised.
His mouth dropped open.
‘Kyle – it is Kyle,’ he gasped.
Had his face been the barometer of his mood, it would barely have registered a change, but his voice, rising in pitch and volume, was not so easily mistaken. ‘You had Kyle all this time!’ he raged. ‘How do you do this? He is WMC.’ He pointed at Jacob. ‘…And he is WMC. You cannot do this.’
Realising that Yuri was not one to be mastered with a smile, she returned anger with anger. ‘I did nothing. Were you not listening?’ she said. ‘Unless you’d missed my point, they are after me too. They think I’m implicated.’
Yuri huffed, venting his anger in one explosive outburst. ‘So – tell me, what happened to my friend?’
At some point during his outburst the images had suddenly vanished. ‘Some kind of bomb…’ she said, gently this time.
‘And my friend is…?’
‘Dead…’
He nodded slowly. ‘Show me…’
She replayed the clip.
Yuri stood and watched silently, keeping his questions to the end. ‘And who is the man speaking to him?’ he asked.
‘That is Director Trask,’ she replied. ‘The director of Homeland Security. He was also killed in the explosion.’
‘I said “not one man I’d ever met”. It’s like I said. A meeting was arranged. I took your man Kyle and then stayed outside. I don’t know who he met with. But I hear rumours. And everyone that’s ever met The Indian gives a different story. Sometimes he’s a she… Sometimes a blonde… And sometimes a man with dark hair and a beard. So it ain’t hard to figure that he’s more than one person.’
Yuri wasn’t sure he was feeling any less confused. ‘So how would someone like me get to meet The Indian?’
Raven-beak grinned. ‘You don’t! Not unless I make it happen.’
Yuri raised a hand. The conversation was beginning to irritate him.
Emboldened, Raven-beak just knocked it aside. ‘And that ain’t the way it’s going to happen.’
‘So, what will it take?’
‘Look – I’m going to be putting myself at hazard here, so it’s gotta be worth my while.’
Yuri decided to indulge the man. Threats weren’t going to get him what he wanted. ‘So, what will it take?’
‘You’re WMC aren’t you?’
Yuri nodded. It was hardly an admission.
‘Good – then you shouldn’t find this a problem.’ Raven-beak was now looking altogether too relaxed. ‘I want two cases of Redbank bourbon. I want tobacco – ten pouches of the good stuff. Ile de Castro, or something like that. And I want stims. NovaStim and Sandman. Twenty hits of each,’ he said, rattling off what sounded like a pre-rehearsed shopping list.
‘That stuff’s not on the inventory,’ Yuri observed. In fact most of it was illegal in New Chicago, which was of course why he wanted it.
‘But you can get it.’
It was not a question.
Yuri nodded. ‘I can get it.’
‘Good… You have twenty-four hours. Get the merchandise for me and then meet me at Madame Leferau’s. I trust you’re happy with the venue?’
Yuri nodded. He knew the place of course…
‘Good.’
Presuming that he was now free to go, Raven-beak walked off.
Yuri had then decided to check out the proposed venue for their exchange. Ordinarily, Raven-beak’s list of demands would not have been too challenging. The items he’d requested were not readily available on the WMC’s inventory, but procuring them would not be beyond his means, though if what Pitor had said was true, getting his hands on them was going to be tough.
Figuring that he needed a place to lay low and some time to think, Madame Leferau’s had seemed as good a place as any, and given its reputation for being the best-known secret in the slums, it should not have surprised him that Jacob might have reached the same conclusion, though quite how he’d come to discover the place was beyond him.
Nevertheless, that’s where Yuri had discovered him, in what had been perhaps the second most unlikely encounter of the day. Jacob had been wearing overalls much like those belonging to any grubber and his face was as beaten and as bruised as those who indulged in the undercity’s most popular pastimes, the muggings and brawling, that Yuri had not recognised him straight away, though something in his manner had distinguished him from every other grubber he’d seen that day. Jacob’s skin was almost immaculate, lacking the usual tattoos, dirt, and oil, that would have commonly been seen upon someone in his line of work, and he’d seemed ill at ease with his surroundings – incongruities enough to have drawn Yuri’s eye…
Only then had he recognised his friend and colleague – Jacob.
But what of the woman standing next to him? Yuri was sure he’d never seen her before.
The woman had been engaged in some deal with Madame Leferau while Jacob looked on with interest.
Yuri had waited.
Madame Leferau had concluded their business with a click of her fingers, summoning a serving girl who’d then led Jacob and the woman away.
Yuri had dithered a moment, allowing them a head start before following at a discrete distance. Having then reached the fifth floor, he’d waited on the stairwell for the serving girl to return, his accomplished imitation of a man under the influence of alcohol rendering him virtually invisible to a woman who was so used to ignoring the habits of drunken patrons going to and fro.
It had then been no challenge to discover the room to which she’d escorted them. The curtain that served as a door had muted their conversation, but not so much that he’d been unable to recognise Jacob’s voice. But curious to learn who the woman might have been, he didn’t introduce himself straight away, and loitered instead in a hidden place to one side of the door.
And he had waited…
And listened.
And only once the conversation had finished, did he choose to make his appearance…
46
There were sounds of commotion coming from the compound behind them, along with the guttural roar of some machine being woken. Tammy wondered what it might be, right up until the moment it appeared at the gate. She’d never seen anything quite like it, though she recognised many similarities to the rusted vehicles dotted along the ribbons of synth-rock. It consisted of a metal cockpit designed to hold two people, and a four-wheeled flatbed mounting a heavy calibre auto-mag.
She picked up her pace, overtaking Jocelyn who had until now been leading the way. The buzz-sawing of bullets pecking the ground a few metres behind them was all the encouragement she needed. If they could make it to the dense trees and broken buildings that lay ahead of them, they might be safe. The uneven ground and convoluted paths between the trees would hopefully be too much for the machine chasing them.
But they were still too far away, and at this distance, the trees were nothing more than a promise of safety. Tammy considered sprinting to them across open ground. It was perhaps no more than three or four hundred metres to the treeline and their pursuer’s aim was none too accurate. Given her unnatural strength and endurance, she would have stood a better-than-even chance of getting there alive.
But Jocelyn would stand almost no chance at all.
It was possible she’d been lying about the nanites swarming in Tammy’s blood, but she doubted it. She could feel them… She could not afford to let Jocelyn die.
It seemed that their only hope lay in the string of carriages paraded along one of the paired metal rails to the landward side of the grey ribbon. These rails had become quite prolific as they approached the storage silos, having branched again and again to form nine or ten parallel sets, upon which were a number of rusting carriages, similar in concept to the beetle-like ground cars, but larger. The carriages did not look sound enough to withstand the bullets from a heavy auto-mag, but they would obscure them enough to draw some fire as they then turned towards the trees. Hopping nimbly between the tracks, Tammy hurried towards them.
But Jocelyn was not as agile as Tammy. She stumbled.
Bullets shrieked as they danced around them and into a nearby carriage.
An explosion echoed from somewhere inside the camp and a thick oily fireball swept skywards trailing a tail of greasy black smoke.
Tammy hauled Jocelyn to her feet and dragged her amongst the carriages.
‘We’ll never make it,’ said Jocelyn, measuring the distance with her eyes.
‘We have to make it,’ Tammy insisted. ‘If it gets any closer to us, that auto-mag is going to tear us to pieces, whether we’re behind one of these carriages or not.’ As if to underscore her point, a line of holes appeared in the wall above their heads. She couldn’t see the ATV, but she could hear it gunning its way towards them. ‘So, let’s do it – now!’
It seemed that Jocelyn required no other encouragement. The near misses had dispelled any remaining reservations. She started to run, making a good pace towards the trees.
The ATV manoeuvred into view before they were halfway across. A few mercifully poor shots hammered chips from the ground near their feet as the gunner struggled to compensate for the vehicle’s blustering movements. But neither one of them hesitated. They kept on running. Their only hope lay in the treeline a couple of hundred metres away.
There was another burst of fire from the auto-mag. Tammy could hear the whip-snap of the rounds puncturing the air around her. Perhaps Jocelyn had been right after all…
And then the ground exploded behind them, swallowing the ATV in clouds of smoke and shrapnel.
The gyrojet was an unexpected ally. It was flying so low it barely cleared the roofs and treetops. Tammy only noticed it at the last moment, basking in a current of turbid air: a shark amongst shifting currents, its turbofans barely a whisper.
Tammy didn’t hesitate to wonder why none of the rockets were winging their way toward them. She ran headlong into the trees, leaving the smoking wreckage of the ATV scattered across the ground behind them.
And didn’t stop…
47
There were footsteps approaching the doorway. Whoever it was, they were being careful to advertise themselves, planting their feet with slow deliberation so as not to spook anyone.
Rebecca drew her weapon and slipped to one side of the doorway. At close range, the Glock Mk102 5.5mm electro-mag was a formidable weapon. Its low-profile tungsten-tipped rounds could rip through a centimetre of steel plating at a range of up to twenty metres, though beyond that, it was of little use. The short barrel of the Guardian variant e-mag pistol and its consequent shortcomings had limited its popularity, but it was, nevertheless, quiet, discrete, and easily concealed, and could ruin the day of anyone standing at the wrong end of it.
‘It is me – Yuri. I am looking for Jacob.’
Jacob waved her down. ‘It’s okay – I know him.’ There was no mistaking that distinctive Ukrainian inflexion that was common amongst those born in the Hephaestan mines. Then more loudly he said, ‘it’s okay Yuri – you can come in.’
Yuri swept the curtain aside and stepped through. Noticing the gun in Rebecca’s hands, he hesitated. ‘She knows I am friendly – yes?’
Jacob nodded. ‘Yes – she knows you are friendly.’ He spoke loudly, for Rebecca’s benefit.
She lowered her gun but did not return it to her pocket. Nor did she engage the safety. Nevertheless the move had been enough to reassure Yuri.
‘My friend it is good to see you,’ he said, his face expanding in a smile. ‘When you did not return home, I began to worry. The world has gone crazy you know. The ERT are arresting people here, there, and everywhere. All WMC…’ He waved his arms emphatically. ‘They came to your home. But I managed to get away.’
Jacob frowned at Rebecca. ‘Why would they do that?’
She looked genuinely surprised but said nothing
Yuri walked over to the bed and plumped himself down on the edge of the mattress. ‘Fuck knows why,’ he replied thinking that the question had been directed at him. ‘Perhaps they think we are terrorists? Perhaps they think we blew up their headquarters?’
Rebecca’s face drained of all colour. This was news to her. ‘What are you talking about?!’
Yuri rumbled the sound of an explosion while throwing his hands out in a crude imitation of a mushroom cloud.
‘No!’ Rebecca was reeling, though other than the whip-crack expression of her dismay, the signs were subtle, the narrowing of the eyes and the listless sagging of her shoulders.
Yuri seemed surprised. He jutted his chin towards her in a gesture that conveyed an accusation as much as suspicion. ‘So, who is this woman?’
‘This is Rebecca,’ said Jacob succinctly.
‘And?’
‘And what?’ Jacob’s petulance was unintended. Like Rebecca, he’d found the news of the attack on the ERT headquarters profoundly disturbing. The hope that he might exonerate himself of his alleged crimes had just diminished to nothing. There was no way they were going to believe he was innocent now.
‘Who is she?’ Yuri persisted.
‘She’s…’
Jacob had started to explain but Rebecca finished his sentence for him. ‘…Officer Rebecca Lake – Homeland Security.’
‘Shit!’ Yuri jumped to his feet. Though he’d been listening in on their conversation, the snippets that had reached his ears had not been enough to implicate her as an officer in the ERT.
‘She’s fine – I think. She rescued me from the Capitol Spire,’ Jacob explained before indulging him with a brief history of his arrest and subsequent “escape”. If it had not been for her, he too would have died in the explosion.
‘It is a bad day for us all I think,’ said Yuri morosely.
******
Yuri and Jacob had both endured a restless night on the floor, though come the morning, neither one of them had been in any position to comment on how well Rebecca might have slept, but, had they been asked, they would doubtless have received the answer “much better than they had”. She had after all, won the bed in that usual act of democracy that always seemed to favour the female sex…
Her bed was empty.
Jacob could not remember hearing her leave and Yuri seemed equally baffled, though he was at first more vocal about the fact that he’d been forced to sleep on the floor while a perfectly good bed had gone unused. Jacob’s thoughts had been of a more morbid nature, wondering if she’d perhaps had a change of heart and betrayed him to the authorities, and he’d half expected to hear the footsteps of heavily armed ERT troopers coming up the corridor at any moment. Had he been fit to move, he might have been paranoid enough to voice his fears to Yuri, urging him to find them an alternative hideout, but as it happened, he was too broken in body and spirit to care.
But when the footsteps had returned, it had been one pair and not many. And they had belonged to Rebecca.
She blustered through the curtain, half oblivious to their presence. She’d been crying and her cheeks had the look of granite weathered by the rain.
‘What’s wrong?’ Yuri asked, in an uncharacteristic display of sympathy.
‘It’s all gone,’ she replied.
Jacob was still groggy from his sleep. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘ERT Head Office… It’s all gone. Blown to pieces within hours of our departure!’ Her words were a proclamation like thunder.
Jacob’s grogginess was rapidly overwhelmed by a feeling of stomach-turning nausea that had nothing to do with his recent beatings or lack of sleep. ‘And I’m guessing that they think I’m somehow responsible, even though I was locked up and being beaten the whole time?’
Yuri’s look became one of horror. He’d gleaned something of Jacob’s ordeal at the hands of the ERT but had not imagined that they could so violently abuse a member of the WMC.
Rebecca remained unperturbed. Her feelings had been washed away. ‘No – they think we were somehow responsible. You – and me. I wanted to make contact with the ERT. To see if everything your friend said was true.’ She glanced at Yuri. ‘Down here we’re “off the grid”, so I needed to go outside to access the ERT’s CommNet. But I failed... It won’t accept my login.’
Yuri did not need to vocalise the obvious question, his face said it all.
She glared back at him. ‘Don’t worry – I’m not exactly an amateur. I took myself well away from here and rerouted through one of the spoke servers. They have no idea where we are.’
Yuri’s head bopped respectfully. ‘You say you failed… How?’
Her features did not soften though her anger appeared to have been directed elsewhere. ‘My operational clearance has been “revoked” – apparently. Of course, I didn’t know it right away.’ She took a deep breath. ‘So, I tried a friend of mine in Homeland. Someone I could rely on to be discrete. And he informed me that we’ve been listed as prime suspects. Of course, if he’d really believed it, he wouldn’t have given me the tip off…’
‘So why would anyone else believe it?’ Yuri asked.
‘I don’t know. My friend knows me well enough to believe that I couldn’t possibly have done such a thing, but as far as anyone else can see, I appropriated a transport to take you away from the tower minutes before the explosion took place…’
Jacob was incredulous. ‘That’s it – that’s all they’ve got?’
‘Someone… probably someone high up… has already decided on your guilt. And mine by association.’
‘So, you believe me now?’
‘No!’ Rebecca’s eyes were chips of mica in the stalwart carving of her face. ‘Not entirely…’ She pointed her arm, projecting images from her PA onto the wall. It was clearly video footage from one of the cells in the ERT complex. Jacob’s body ached at the memory. There were two men talking at a table. The first wore a suit with the complexion of spun steel, and the second, the familiar orange overalls of a man accused. A man that Yuri had clearly recognised.
His mouth dropped open.
‘Kyle – it is Kyle,’ he gasped.
Had his face been the barometer of his mood, it would barely have registered a change, but his voice, rising in pitch and volume, was not so easily mistaken. ‘You had Kyle all this time!’ he raged. ‘How do you do this? He is WMC.’ He pointed at Jacob. ‘…And he is WMC. You cannot do this.’
Realising that Yuri was not one to be mastered with a smile, she returned anger with anger. ‘I did nothing. Were you not listening?’ she said. ‘Unless you’d missed my point, they are after me too. They think I’m implicated.’
Yuri huffed, venting his anger in one explosive outburst. ‘So – tell me, what happened to my friend?’
At some point during his outburst the images had suddenly vanished. ‘Some kind of bomb…’ she said, gently this time.
‘And my friend is…?’
‘Dead…’
He nodded slowly. ‘Show me…’
She replayed the clip.
Yuri stood and watched silently, keeping his questions to the end. ‘And who is the man speaking to him?’ he asked.
‘That is Director Trask,’ she replied. ‘The director of Homeland Security. He was also killed in the explosion.’
